On Sunday; Remembering The Murderer Who Did Good

By FRANCIS X. CLINES

Published: October 9, 1994

HAVING forfeited the heart of his life to prison as a convicted murderer, Ron Wikberg was dying the other day and hoping he might be remembered as "a bad guy who did good."

Fair enough: He shot down a grocery store clerk during a holdup 25 years ago and then, within what he called the "niche" of life left to him, he became a prison journalist. He developed into a muckraker with enough creativity and compassion that some people on the outside actually considered him an exemplar of the now largely quaint, once seriously debated theory that a prison can be a place for rehabilitation, not just punishment.

"This wasn't what I started off to be," Mr. Wikberg said as he lay dying. He mixed regret and pride in a review of his 51 years of life, quitting his terminal morphine medication to focus on his past during a two-day interview with a friend, Dave Isay of National Public Radio. "I never thought I'd be in prison, or would be doing bad things and have to work so hard doing good things to try and make up for it."

He finished among us on the outside, an ex-con who managed two years of freedom before dying of cancer last weekend. He was a foolish and dangerous young man when he went to prison, but managed to age on the inside in complex, human ways. He often spoke of "the harm I've done" through murder as he sought a life of expiation, carefully investigating prison life and detailing how it was part of the problem, not the hard-edged solution the public might prefer.

ACROSS 23 years inside the notorious Louisiana State Prison at Angola, Mr. Wikberg grew to become nothing less than a thoughtful prison expert. He was even occasionally consulted, though eventually ignored, in the nation's ever-escalating political debate over precisely how much more of a crackdown on criminals each new political season's voters are craving. This season's candidate commercials have compressed the issue to hot-button tag lines like "And, of course, the death penalty." Or, for the moderates, "Three strikes and you're out."

Readers who prefer journalism about criminal justice to be as simplistic as the candidates' commercials have little to learn from Ron Wikberg. He was taught jailhouse reporting by another convicted murderer, Wilbert Rideau, an illiterate teen-ager who was self-educated and became the gifted, fiery editor of The Angolite, the nation's leading prison magazine, honored with a dozen professional awards. Ron Wikberg joined an inmate staff whose level of work perversely earned them the freedom to roam the prison at will with tape recorders and confidentiality guarantees. They produced pioneer exposes on a score of subjects, from the prison rape culture to the nation's looming glut of superannuated felons consigned under modern parole-proof sentences.

"You got to approach life objectively," Ron Wikberg said, "Like writing a story." His stories offer some enlightment to all sides in the prison debate at a time when the United States has come to lead the industrialized world in incarceration now that the Soviet Union and South African police states have fallen. The Angolite stories of Ron Wikberg can be as easily read for their "taxpayers' waste" spin as for their "prison crackdown" insights.

HE was a lanky and sad-eyed prisoner, a friendly romantic whose wife, Kay, was courted in three years of letter writing and married as soon as he was free. "We had a good marriage," she said after helping him die. "I don't mind people knowing we were happy."

His friend and editor, Mr. Rideau, carries on the work with stories that resist the prison simplicities of the campaign commercials. He is perennially rejected as a candidate for clemency; state officials candidly admit the editor is a hostage to his own rehabilitation and celebrity as the family of his murder victim continues to urge no mercy for him after 33 years inside.

"Have enough fun for me," the editor told Ron Wikberg two years ago when he walked out from Angola into freedom itself. Ron smiled at the gate and said he would wait out here for the day when they could meet free as "two bad guys who did good."

Law-abiding people of all sorts -- those who opt for crackdown and those who hold out for rehabilitation -- are left the comfort of Ron Wikberg's final cold-eyed summary of his convict's life: "Do I think the good that I've done overshadows the bad that I've done? No. I don't have that feeling. I think there's a lot more I could do. And it's that that I regret, 'cause I want to do some more. I'm just not going to get a chance to."